Jacco,
Many thanks for excellent work!
For folks who haven’t caught the significance of the SteelSeries Gauges, these are cross-platform, real time gauges that work on any browser platform (AFAIK). Jacco’s initial efforts are great, but there is much more that can be added in the future. For example, on Mark’s SteelSeries Gauge page: http://weather.wilmslowastro.com/gauges5/gauges.htm, when you mouse-over a gauge (or click on it from an iPhone/iPad), a historical graph window pops up. In other words, high-density information in minimal space.
While WDL and Cumulus Realtime webpage have a great look, they aren’t available on iPhones, iPads, and other platforms that support Adobe Flash or Silverlight. Access one of these webpages from your iPad, and you get a terse message that you need to download the latest version of Flash or Silverlight. I.e. the pages are not available for “i” users. Since the iPhone/iPad platforms are growing faster than PC and Mac platforms, and are becoming the platform of choice for viewing content, this is a huge limitation. (So huge that I wrote off WD as a weather software platform until some folks convinced me otherwise.)
Until I saw the SteelSeries Gauges and Jacco’s post, the only thing available for iPhone/iPad users was more traditional approaches, including separate sets of pages specifically for iPhone/iPad platform. That means two code bases to maintain and designing a website that would handle both. Using the SteelSeries Gauges, you can have ONE code base and a simpler website.
I’m just starting with my own website and appreciate all of the help that you folks have offered. OTOH, I’ve been a professional programmer for 20 years. IMO, this is one of the most significant advances in weather website development.
When my weather website is up, the first enhancement implemented will be the SteelSeries Gauges. And I hope to add to SteelSeries for WD knowledge and code bases.
Thanks and regards,
Dan.